Tuesday, November 25, 2014

I'm popping by today as part of the Simon Says Stamp December Card Kit Blog Hop!

This month's kit is called Winter Twinkle and I love that it revolves around the theme of heat embossing! Heat embossing was actually part of my very first experience with stamping when my mom and I heat embossed the thank you cards we made for my wedding over 15 years ago!

For today's card I decided to take the heat embossing technique and do two different things with it. First, I simply die cut a bunch of circles and heat embossed them with a couple of layers of the embossing powder. Be sure to let it cool off before you press your embossing ink over it the second time or you could ruin your ink pad. (I may speak from experience). ;) Secondly, I heat embossed the largest circle with 3-4 layers of embossing powder and while the powder was still hot I pressed one of the stamps inked with embossing ink into it for about 10 seconds to create a faux wax seal. If you try this and it doesn't work the first time, just add another layer of powder and heat and it should all melt evenly again before you press you stamp in again. :)

In case you're interested, here are a few other blog posted where I share cards with interesting heat embossed techniques:

Before you go, I want to mention that Simon Says Stamp is giving away a Simon Says Stamp grab bag loaded with fun products at EVERY stop on the hop! All you have to do is leave a comment by 6 pm EST on Saturday, November 29. Winners will be posted on the Simon Says Stamp Blog Sunday, November 30th.

This is your final stop on the blog hop!
Thanks so much for stopping by!
Sarah

Before I get to that though, I had a question about how I used the foam adhesive to make my shaker elements on THESE cards. I've updated the information at the bottom of that post.

I love making die cut backgrounds but hate when there are little wasted pieces of cardstock. (Yes, I'm THAT crafter, lol). I'm happy to say there was VERY little cardstock wasted in the making of these cards. Yay!

All of the new shaped Stitches dies from Simon come with the dies all still attached to each other so the spacing between them is perfectly straight and even. (I'm very tempted to leave them this way...at least for a while). Because of this, I was able to quickly and easily run 6 different colours of 4.25" by 5.5" cardstock through my diecut machine and end up with all the pieces necessary to make this card set:

I went through all my Simon Says Stamp stamp sets and picked various sentiments that fit nicely in the center rectangle. I white heat embossed the sentiments and assembled the cards starting with the largest diecuts so everything would be perfectly centered.

I love making card sets as hostess gifts and think non-bulky cards work best for these sets. Having all these little rainbows on my table sure cheered me up and I'm planning on making some more in different shades of single colours to create an ombre effect.